February 17, 1986

No Balm in Gilead for Margaret Atwood

By MERVYN ROTHSTEIN

he President and Congress have been assassinated by right-wing religious fanatics who have overthrown the Government and set up
a monotheocratic dictatorship based on biblical principles in a land they now call Gilead. Women may no longer possess jobs, or property, or money of any kind. Pollution has sharply reduced fertility, and certain women,
selected for their ability to breed, have become slaves - Handmaids -forced to try to conceive through joyless copulation in bizarre menages a trois with their Commanders and the Commanders' barren wives.

''I delayed writing it for about three years after I got the idea because I felt it was too crazy,'' Miss Atwood says, sitting in the offices of her publisher, Houghton Mifflin. ''Then two things happened. I started noticing
that a lot of the things I thought I was more or less making up were now happening, and indeed more of them have happened since the publication of the book. There is a sect now, a Catholic charismatic spinoff sect, which
calls the women handmaids. They don't go in for polygamy of this kind but they do threaten the handmaids according to the biblical verse I use in the book - sit down and shut up.

''The second thing was that I was writing another novel and this one kept getting into it and messing it up, and it became obvious that I would never be able to write the novel I was writing unless I wrote this one.
So I stopped writing the other one and started writing this one.''

'A Study of Power'

Some critics have called the novel a feminist tract. ''Novels are not slogans,'' Miss Atwood responds. ''If I wanted to say just one thing I would hire a billboard. If I wanted to say just one
thing to one person, I would write a letter. Novels are something else. They aren't just political messages. I'm sure we all know this, but when it's a book like this you have to keep on saying it. The book
is an examination of character under certain circumstances, among other things. It's not a matter of men against women. That happens to be in the book because I think if it were going to happen in the United States,
that's the form it would take. But it's a study of power, and how it operates and how it deforms or shapes the people who are living within that kind of regime.

''You could say it's a response to 'it can't happen here.' When they say 'it can't happen here,' what they usually mean is Iran can't happen here, Czechoslovakia can't
happen here. And they're right, because this isn't there. But what could happen here? It wouldn't be some people saying, 'Hi, folks, we're Communists and we're going to be your new Government.'
But if you were going to do it, what would you do? What emotions would you appeal to? What groups would you utilize? How exactly would you go about it? Well, something like the way the religious right is doing things. And
the ultimate result of that process would be the union of church and state, which this country since 1776 has striven to keep apart, with great difficulty, because the foundation of this country was not separation of church
and state. We're often taught in schools that the Puritans came to America for religious freedom. Nonsense. They came to establish their own regime, where they could persecute people to their heart's content just
the way they themselves had been persecuted. If you think you have the word and the right way, that's the only thing you can do.''

Playing With Hypotheses

''A lot of what writers do is they play with hypotheses,'' she says, ''just as scientists do. I was brought up in a family of scientists, so I know about playing with hypotheses. It's a kind
of 'if this, then that' type of thing. The original hypothesis would be some of the statements that are being made by the 'Evangelical fundamentalist right.' If a woman's place is in the home, then
what? If you actually decide to enforce that, what follows?

''If people ask if the book is implicitly political, I say no, because it's not for me a question of saying this group is bad, this group is good. These positions lead to certain results, is what I would say.
Any position can lead to results that you may not have anticipated.''

The 46-year-old Miss Atwood was born in Ottawa and grew up in North Ontario, Quebec and Toronto. She has written more than 20 books of poetry, fiction and nonfiction, including five earlier novels, and has received many awards
for her work. She lives in Toronto, but has traveled extensively, living for periods of time in Iran. She is in New York both to promote her new novel and to teach for the spring semester at New York University, where she
is Berg Visiting Professor of English. ''The Handmaid's Tale'' was started in West Berlin and finished in Alabama.

How did she, as a Canadian, come to write about the United States? ''We all write books about our ancestors from time to time, and this is my book about my ancestors,'' she says. ''I was a 1630's
Puritan on both sides of my family. One of the people the book is dedicated to is Mary Webster, who was one of my ancestors. My mother's mother's maiden name was Webster. Mary Webster is one of the interesting
people - she was the witch who got hanged and it didn't take. It didn't kill her. So she lived on, much to the consternation of everyone.''

The Possibility of Escape

''The Handmaid's Tale'' has been compared to other cautionary tales, such as ''Brave New World'' and ''Nineteen Eighty-Four.'' Miss Atwood says that she feels
there is at least one way her novel is like ''Nineteen Eighty-Four.''

''You'll notice,'' she says, ''and not many people have, that the section on Newspeak at the end of 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' talks about Newspeak in the past tense. It's written
in ordinary language, not Newspeak. The obvious implication from that is that the regime has fallen, that someone in the future, we don't know who, has lived to tell the tale and to write this analysis of Newspeak
in the past tense.

''And my book isn't totally bleak and pessimistic either, for several reasons. The central character - the Handmaid Offred - gets out. The possibility of escape exists. A society exists in the future which is
not the society of Gilead and is capable of reflecting about the society of Gilead in the same way that we reflect about the 17th century. Her little message in a bottle has gotten through to someone - which is about all
we can hope, isn't it?''